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> You could literally spin up an Ethereum sidechain in an afternoon:

Any proofs that you can do it with a new PoS consensus, new block explorer, original bridging protocol?

Above-mentioned sidechains can't be spin up in afternoon.

e.g. for xDai is tool more 2.5 years to write a dPoS consensus POSDAO (~22k lines of code) and put it in production https://github.com/poanetwork/posdao-contracts that's the only staking consensus included into two core Ethereum clients -- Nethermind and OpenEthereum

BlockScout is > 200k lines of code

TokenBridge is > 46k lines of code

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I did mention in the article:

"There are exceptions of course. The xDai sidechains is very popular in the Ethereum community, especially for low-value payments and rapid experimentation. But the xDai team and community never engage in misinformation campaigns about the security tradeoffs that developers and users must take to build or transact on it."

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"Sidechains refuse to die because they are easy to spin up. Usually people spin them up to create a pitch deck overnight, raise money from VCs, and dump a token on retail."

Was it what Polygon did? When they got their billions, they pivoted to Rollups solutions. Is this how you see what happened?

Thanks for the content.

Best!

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what about SKALE? It's custodial, yes - but seems well build with security as top priority.

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Among sidechains there is nuance as to how secure they are relative to each other, yes. A sidechain where the funds on L1 contract are secured by its (sidechain's) entire validator set is superior to another which relies on a small federation or a subset of validators, all things equal ofc. You would have to examine the total stake value of sidechain validators, slashing mechanisms, consensus thresholds, etc. But then again, why would a developer go to all this trouble and absorb the risks, when they can build on a rollup, or spin up their own, and inherit the security of L1?

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Are zk rollups EVM compatible now? Would put that in cons

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There are multiple Ethereum-tethered zk-rollups live today. Any L1 can be "compatible" with zk-rollups as long as there is a mechanism to (a) attach data to transactions and stored forever by L1 nodes, and (b) verify the SNARK proof

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